I upgraded our VMware installation from 3.5 to vSphere 5.1 and helped with a move to a new SAN after complications arose with our old ones.

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It was time to upgrade our VMware server. We were running 3.5 and missing out on several major improvements available in late version. The biggest one for us was being able to backup full VMs using Unitrends to allow us to be down minutes instead of days should something happen to the VM.

I installed vSphere 5.1 on a server, configured the vCenter server, and migrated a few test VMs to the new host. We were planning on reusing our Promise VTrax SANs from our 3.5 installation and we did not hear a peep suggesting trouble when discussing our environment with our vendors. Everything went well during our testing weeks. A maintenance period was scheduled for afterhours and we migrated our production environment to the new server.

About an hour after finishing the migration, several of our VMs are not responding. We start shutting down the ones that are still accessible but sluggish and our non-responsive ones start responding again. Restarting VMs cause another batch of VMs to become non-responsive. One very long phone call with VM support reveals that our SAN is not officially supported by VMware and logs are pointing to it as our culprit. We were able to get our business critical production servers up and going and they behaved as long as no further load was introduced to the SANs. Our department was limping along since our test environment and some quality of life services were down but end-users didn't see any obvious effects except that our OpenFire server for IMs was down.

Our IT director requested and was granted funds to purchase a new SAN. NetApp came to our rescue soon thereafter. They quickly sent a SAN that met our specifications to us for a price within our budget and got an installer/instructor to us ASAP. The installer was brilliant and had me comfortably moving through the UI of the SAN in a few hours. The next day our full environment is up and running better than ever before.

Our collection of VMs have expanded and the Promise SANs have been regulated to less stressful work like storing backup archives (they wouldn't let me chuck one off the roof). Plenty of lessons were learned during this exercise, not the least of which was to incorporate some form of load testing prior to going live.